March 2016 Notes

March FTX will commence at 0900 on the 19th at OP1, Training Area North. This may be our last exercise at TAN until October as we are transitioning out of Rural OPS. Intelligence gathering means real-time data from the hot zones. Maybe not as boring as camp-craft for all you high-speed operators that are already well up the curve on middle-of-nowhere ingress and survival. This will be more like, “How to Disappear in the Crowd”.

This becomes more challenging when accomplished in bigger cities, and sometimes the goal is not to get as far away from the metropolis as quickly as possible. On the other side of the coin is the new military assessments of tactics in Megacities. Trying to operate in Mumbai, or Sao Paulo, or even New York City, gets highly complicated, logistically and tactically, for even large forces with 5000 to 50,000 or more people when going into cities of 10 million or more. A lot of territory filled with potential traps, a high risk of getting separated and cut off from reinforcements and resupply, and failing comms.

A fairly recent scenario is laid out in an article over at Small Wars Journal called “Using the Internet of Things to Gain and Maintain Situational Awareness in Dense Urban Environments and Mega Cities”A report from LTC Peeke, Chief of Innovation Branch at HQ TRADOC, US Army Capabilities Integration Center. It talks about hostage taking and rescue operations in a high-rise building in a typical Megacity. The report is short and outlined as a best case scenario with no complications. The lessons to be learned are to think from the opposite direction and how to make that hostage rescue mission as insanely complicated as possible by making those things they count on to simply not work.

But back to something more local, the Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism Division of the Texas Dept of Public Safety received their copy of the “Small Unit Commands” training manual from the DEA back at Christmas, 2009. The DEA stumbled on their copy when they took off some dead guy they believed was Los Zetas. The English translations are a little rough but readable. You can read it here for the value of the shooting drills, because that’s mostly what it contains. Your Mileage May Vary. Pretty creative though.

And don’t forget to mark your calendars for the first week in June to be at Brock’s for the 9th NC PATCON. The schedule of events is getting finalized and we all hope to hold another Command Post Exercise similar to the one last fall. Brock puts in a tremendous amount of effort into these events, as do others. You’re really missing out if you don’t come on out.

Just for some added realism maybe somebody could bring their AAV. Haven’t found any for sale around these parts (that run), but…..

….we know of a guy selling low mileage Russian made BTR-60’s and BTR-80’s, minus some of the goodies. Would work just as well.